Sit. Stay. Bite.

About 7 or 8 years ago Rodney used to help a family friend train police dogs. He started by taking his German Shepherd over for a little obedience training and found the K9 training to be very interesting. R has told me several stories about this training and how much he loved it. The stories sound interesting and he has always said he would love to show me sometime.

Friday night we had dinner with his parents, as usual, then he suggested we stop by Jeff's house to see if he was doing any training. Sure enough, we arrived to find Jeff and 6 other men outside with several dogs and police cars. We stopped to watch a little and ended up staying for 3 hours.

We watched the dogs sniff out drugs and sit down when they found them. We watched an officer get his dog out of the car and run a drill just like a roadside traffic stop. One of the neatest parts of the training is the bite sleeve. The person taking the bite puts on a big protective sleeve and the dog, when called to, will attack the sleeve, biting until being called off.

The dogs love biting. When you do drug searches with them, they are working for a toy. The toy is the reward for finding the drugs. When you do bites with them, they work for the pure joy of biting. One dog we saw Friday night was particularly fond of biting and was pretty hard to call off. They were working on that. R actually put on the bite suit and took a bite from this dog. He loves the thrill of it.

It was nice to see a part of R's life that he loves. The stories became real and I felt like I knew a little more about him. It also made me excited about the dog we will hopefully be getting soon. More on that later...